RECOVERING A SENSE OF PLACE

WILMA DYKEMAN

Our wanderings, both far and near, define us.

On a drizzly, warm spring morning I sit on an open deck at the back of my home in the North Carolina mountains. My front row center seat faces a steep hillside of live theater. Nature’s live theater.

Today the wild azaleas are in bloom. Against a scene of scattered oak, poplar, pine, and dogwood trees a few are intense yellow—the color of country butter—but most flaunt banners described by botanist William Bartram in his travel journal two centuries ago as “blazing flames in the woods.” In mountain folk-speech, this season is seeing a lavish of them. Waiting backstage for the moment are companion thickets of tangled laurel and leathery-leafed rhododendron whose buds are swelling toward their succession of bloom. And below, in the moist mulch at the foot of the hill, ostrich ferns are unfurling toward their five-and-six-foot maturity, reminders of faraway rain forests.

Nothing I look upon has been planted. All lives and thrives here by natural design.

This is my childhood home. In front of the house the stream whose voice accompanied me to sleep each night still winds its way toward rivers and oceans. Nearby are scattered gray, moss-encrusted boulders on which I once played and imagined distant adventures. Somewhere offstage a wood thrush pours forth lilting notes.

For a little while I rediscover a sense of place.

In this place, I knew the security that I, like all children, needed. Out of this security grew whatever creativity I enjoyed as an adult, marrying daily family routines with the complexity of a career. That security, I now realize, lay only partially in the fact that we “owned” this place by legal deed. The place also owned us in ways both visible and invisible. Discovery of that ownership nurtured creativity.

Rooted then in these woods and waters and the weathers of memory is a relationship to environment and atmosphere that has served me faithfully. Early on it opened for me the world of Charles Dickens’ London, Mark Twain’s Mississippi, Sigrid Undset’s Norway, Chekhov’s and Gogol’s Russia, W.H. Hudson’s “Green Mansions,” Willa Cather’s West, the caged world of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Later I reached out to reflect at his New England pond with Henry David Thoreau, walk the streets of his city with critic Alfred Kazin, share the tenderness and anger of Wallace Stegner for his West and Wendell Berry for his Kentucky as they beheld the destruction of community— their own human community irrevocably bound with nature’s community.

Understanding of my familiar space grew as I ventured farther afield, following, perhaps by instinct, historian Daniel Boorstin’s distinction between the programmed tourist and the traveler as seeker. For the seeker the power of place is what we discover and fold into our memory to enrich the rest of our lives. We climb a majestic Mayan temple in Chichen Itza, mark the approach of confident Masai warriors as they stride across a plain in Kenya, feel the sweep of China’s mighty Yangtze, breathe the cold purity of air on an Alpine pinnacle, watch the pattern emerging from the nimble fingers of a Navajo weaver under the wide southwestern sky. They remind us, by contrast or similarity, of other temples and mountains we have known, of other warriors and women at the tasks of centuries.

The paradox, then, at the heart of a sense of place is the subtle way in which it is both local and universal. Whether growing out of farm or city neighborhood, village or isolated island, the sense of place reflects a wholeness at the core of all life.

My early and continuing awareness of place was probably intensified by the dual vision provided by my parents. My father came late in life from Putnam County, just north of New York City, to Asheville in Western North Carolina’s mountains, where he fell in love with the region and the young woman who would be my mother.

There is a certain irony in the fact that one of my parents seemed to fulfill the stereotypical role of the American as restless wanderer, as a decentered spectator free of allegiance to a particular place. On the contrary, I believe he was drawn here precisely because of a sense of place. The history of the Civil War, travel descriptions in old Harper’s magazines, discovery of the book Our Southern Highlanders, by Horace Kephart (still available today as a landmark study), all sparked his imagination. Finding here a wife who was incompatible with much that he had known, yet compatible with all that he believed and wanted, changed the course of his life.

The newcomer was endlessly curious about his adopted homeland. My childhood was filled with discoveries of a South and people my mother took for granted. For her part, as we journeyed North each year to visit his small town north of The City, my mother was curious about the place in which his family had deep roots. This time our searches followed winding roads through the Hudson River country, balanced occasionally by a venture into The City. The contrast between these explorations has lingered with me for a lifetime.

I delighted, too, in noting differences between Southern and Northern families (dialect, foods, small ceremonies), as well as their similarities (wry humor, local pride). But in truth it was the contrast of scene, of place, that was most intriguing. One setting lay along a lovely, quiet lake; the other perched beside a lively brook. In my father’s small town, grassy sidewalks led to a friendly post office, drug store, library, church, relatives’ homes, and to impromptu conversations. In my mother’s hills the trails climbed through deep shade and filtered sunlight up steep slopes until, at the summit, a great arch of sky opened above and the distant world unrolled below like a magic carpet. It was the best of times in two distinctive places.

Eventually, even my choice of college was prompted, I suspect, in large part by its location. Northwestern University represented no family tradition or counseling by friends. But it offered excellence in major courses I sought and it was near Chicago. Chicago—its lake, its sights, sounds, smells, hustle, and richly varied ethnic neighborhoods— attracted me and added immeasurably to my education. At that time we could prowl strange streets and discover people of different histories, customs, and geographic experiences.

I became a writer. But finding a publisher came only after a meandering exploration across the country with my husband. Our companions were books, in a series called The Rivers of America. Written mainly by historians but also by storytellers and folk-lorists, they shared one common asset: a sense of place. This was my kind of book, one I could shape to my own voice and the North Carolina-Tennessee river that had not yet found a voice, at least in print. After initial rejection (I had to convince Holt, Rinehart that The French Broad would be about a river), and submission of an outline and a chapter, I received a contract. That was the first of 18 books of fiction and non-fiction, and the sense of place gained by writing this book unified the wide variety of subjects dealt with in the others. That variety demanded many modes of research; the unity grew from a resource once described by poet Allen Tate as “knowledge carried to the heart.”

LOSING/FINDING OUR DIRECTION

But now it is late afternoon and as I move among my trees, plants, rocks, and stream, I feel the chill of being an expatriate. Not a literary expatriate in Paris or a political exile in strange lands, but an expatriate in my own country where a frenetic mobility and growing cultural conformity erode that time and energy necessary to understanding the uniqueness at the heart of a sense of place.

Serving the kingdom of the automobile, of which I am an obligatory member, highways lace our land from coast to coast, seeking speed and creating along their routes a standardized service and entertainment complex so that we can eat, sleep, laugh and shop in the same way all of the time. But somewhere, and sometimes hidden in little valleys or among hills and deserts, are those distinctive communities where we once discovered our past, our prolific variety, even our conversation.

Of course, air travel removes us even more decisively from the places we pass through or over, landing us in ports where all is already familiar. At what cost does the convenient travel we demand come if we consistently overlook the places along our way? We travel fast and hard, especially “to save time.” But a sense of place is inextricably interwoven with a sense of time, and how we “spend” the one determines the quality we find in the other.

The gulf between what we once called “our homeplace” and today’s new landscape is wide and grows wider with each fluctuation of distant marketplaces. Meaning traditionally associated with the word “home” disappears behind the gated gatherings of multimillion-dollar mansions and the stark bleakness of acres of “mobile homes” parked cheek by jowl, identified only by numbers. Each “development” cannibalizes the land, using it only until the owner of the “trophy home” can move on to proclaim even greater wealth, or the “mobile home” itself moves on as its dweller seeks a better job or any job at all. Between these raw extremes, there is a vision of “home” struggling to survive in the global economy.

Even our bastions of a national sense of place are under attack. National historic sites, our national parks, and wilderness areas are threatened on the ground, under the ground, and even in the air. In addition, there are the commercial enterprises that mushroom along their boundaries and lap like growing tides at their very entrances. A natural atmosphere necessary to understanding and appreciating these treasures is thereby degraded.

Perhaps my alarm is intense because I cherish the memory of a visit to Yellowstone Park when I was seven years old. It acquainted me with the ancient world of yesterday. Of course, I am not a Luddite opposing all change. But change should be directed by conscious choices, and the wonder and beauty of our national parks are rooted in their freedom from man-made change.

The Cherokee, those Native Americans who once may have roamed this very little valley where I sit, seemed to understand an enduring relationship of people to their place. John Heckewelder, writing his study, Indian Nations, in 1876, observed that his subjects considered themselves only the first among equals in the society of “beasts of the forest, the birds of the air, fishes of the water,” as well as trees and plants of the earth. All nature, he said, “is in their eyes a great whole from which they have not yet ventured to separate themselves.”

Perhaps it is a growing separation from such relationships and wholeness that destroys our sense of place today. Out there, all around us, is a fractured, frantic way of life where, encouraged by a cadre of elite academic voices deploring the provincialism of “place-rooted” societies, our true place is lost. Even more powerful are the cosmopolitan voices proclaiming that “the declining significance of place” will be replaced by “the ascending significance of people.” Are they mutually exclusive? It has seemed to me that the strongest people are those whose affirmative relationships with people are joined to a committed relationship with this planet on which we all live. If part of the joy and creativity of life flows from each person’s uniqueness, may our sense of place confirm at a most basic level that very uniqueness we crave and cherish?

Security in our sense of place permits us to share respect and experience with others. Does anyone today believe that our society is genuinely less divided, less mercenary, less violent, more secure in every meaning of the word, as we shuck off our sense of place?

I look out at my provincial, economically non-productive plot of earth and join Thoreau once more, asking why anyone should attempt to “get away from here.” After all, he told us he had traveled widely around his pond, and I have much traveling yet to do—around this place.

Recommended Readings:

Accawi, Anwar. The Boy from the Tower of the Moon. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.
Berry, Wendell. What Are People For? San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990.
Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
Kazin, Alfred. A Walker in the City. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951.
Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington, DC, 1900.
Santayana, George. Persons and Places. New York: Charles Scribners, 1944.

Wilma Dykeman (CC ‘96) has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Senior Fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a lecturer at universities and conferences across the United States. Her initial acquaintance with the Cosmos Club came at a breakfast in 1962 to celebrate the publication of Seeds of Southern Change, a biography of Dr. Will Alexander, a Club member. Attending that breakfast were lifelong friend, archivist Leonard Rapport, and James Stokely, her husband and co-author. A portrait of his collateral ancestor, Dr. Swann Pritchett Burnett, hangs in the Cosmos Club.

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